Reckoning: A Memoir

If you had met my father you would never, not for an instant, have thought he was an assassin.

flight of confusions and disturbances would flutter across her cheeks like frightened birds.

The war cured me of all the "isms", he said. 'Nazism, communism, socialism, patriotism, nationalism, capitalism. I have seen them all. The problem is human nature. People. Shit always floats to the top.

But heads without hearts are cruel things. Especially young heads.

We always think that the world is made of Kings and Generals. But it is ideas that make the world.

The moon drew me towards it the same way it dragged the heavy oceans. I loved its fragility. Its delicate luminosity. The way it shone its light tenderly and modestly. I longed to touch it, to be an astronaut held in the embrace of its gentle gravity.

Nagging and denial - the dance of marital intimacy

Miss Carter was young and hip and pretty. The telltale stick of white chalk dangled from her fingers like a cigarette or a joint. Miss

felt apprehensive. As we drove along the highway the gumtrees that populated the un-kerbed median strip did not look like the mighty elms and oaks of England. They looked like beggars, their bark hanging from their limbs like tattered rags. They held no promise of adventure. Robin Hood and his Merry Men could never have camouflaged their green hats and tights in dull grey leaves like these. Like the early settlers, I found my five-year-old eyes straining to transform the Aussie bush into a familiar form. It refused to comply with my chocolate-box vision, remaining stubbornly scrappy and scabby. I had no myths or legends with which to populate this landscape. Sounds, sights, smells: everything was different. My shocked senses groped through the cognitive fog, straining to find patterns, fragments they could piece together. Over the months and years, a bank of sensory experiences accumulated. Repetition created a comforting palimpsest of familiarity and a harsh beauty revealed itself. A new life began to emerge. But

the way of the sick soul seems unmanly and diseased.’ This was the fault line, the precise point where my mind bifurcated. I longed to have a mystical experience that would fuse these parts together. I yearned for an unequivocal, undivided mind and a soul of ‘sky-blue tint’. A shadow lay across my soul. I could glimpse it, feel its weight. But what it was or why it was there I could not fathom. I found James’s pragmatism reassuring and steadying, in contrast to Nietzsche, that pyschopomp of misguided youth, to whom the ego was just a jumble of unrelated thoughts that only assume a semblance of order after the fact.

The sharpie uniform is perhaps the most unlikely fashion statement you will ever see, a Frankenstein’s monster of baby-doll plucked eyebrows, skinhead-meets-mullet hair, 1970s fat ties and just a hint of bovver boy. Clothes worn too tight and too small. Kerry had prepared a shopping list: • bluebird earrings • three-inch Mary Jane corkie platform shoes • treads (shoes made using recycled tyres for the sole with suede thonging for the upper) • Lee canvas jeans • beachcombers • short white bobby socks • ribbed tights • a short, flared, preferably panelled skirt • satin baggies • a striped Golden Breed t-shirt or a KrestKnit polo shirt • a tight coral necklace from the surf shop • a Conti brand striped cardigan • blue metallic eye shadow from a small pot or a crayon

There is a simple explanation for why men haven't found women funny. It's because men only ever experience women in relation to men: they never get to see what women are like with one another. Shows like ours started to let men in on the joke.

Inspired by Mitra and the other animals, I got my own little dog—a beagle whom I named Jane Austen because she had the same brow line. It was a rash, ill-advised pet-shop purchase. I bought her for her adorable little face and sad pleading beagle eyes without a thought for breed behavioural characteristics. I didn’t care. I adored her. I found her naughtiness trying but hilarious, especially when she was a puppy. When she was nearly two she followed her nose off the edge of a forty-metre cliff and broke her leg in six places.

But it was the orangutan Mitra who stole my heart. In between takes Mitra would clamber across and casually sling his long arm over your shoulder like an old drinking buddy. He would take your hand in his and, his gentle gaze never leaving yours, lift it to his lips. Mitra was chivalrous. He was also an exceptional actor—far better than me. Acting is all about the eyes. Mitra’s eyes were sad and wise. He would look at you, his eyes blinking softly. There was no threat or challenge there. No judgment. It was as if he already knew everything about you anyway, like a wordless sacrament of confession and absolution. He knew exactly what was going on. He participated in this human nonsense, he knew we were fools. He knew he could crush me with one hand. Looking into those eyes there was no way you could doubt that he had a soul, an uncluttered soul that was millions of years old, that had travelled through many incarnations and forgotten none of the lessons.

I smashed like a dropped vase. And the numbness came. It felt as though I had fallen down a mineshaft and nobody noticed. I could hear voices but I didn’t know how to tell them where I was or how to find me or what was wrong with me. It was as though the very ‘me’ of me had fallen down that mineshaft and all that remained was the hollow shell of a human being.

Vocabulary mattered. ‘Grouse’ meant awesome, and the thumbs-up sign did not mean good luck but ‘up yer bum’. Hot boys were ‘spunks’ and when you had a crush you were ‘rapt’ in them. Kissing was ‘pashing’. But there was one all-purpose phrase that would guarantee me instant entrée into all good sharpie society. And that expression was ‘shit, eh?’ It could be used as a question or an exclamation. Or just a simple indication that you were listening during a long-winded story.